'I have no money and no husband,' comments Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) in Love and Friendship, Whit Stillman's adaptation of Jane Austen's novella, Lady Susan. The dilemma is common both to Austen's heroines and to this American director's: his five films have charted the romantic fortunes of young bourgeois women whose allowances won't quite support their aspirations, and whose relationships with men are, in large part, tactical alliances of wealth and status. For sheer cunning, however, Lady Susan outdoes them all. She charms, she dissembles, she strategises like a military general. 'In one's plight lies one's opportunity,' she observes.